20070624 What Will They Say Next About the President?

What Will They Say Next About the President?

June 24^th, 2007

I received this in an e-mail from a colleague and it certainly gives ya something to thing about…

Sinking polls, vicious verbal attacks, a struggling war effort:

An editorial in the Baltimore Sun stated, “We do not believe the Presidency can ever be more degraded by any of his successors, than it has been by him.” [1]

An imminent former supporter, speaking in New York, “denounced the Administration as having no definite purpose in the war, and was interrupted by frantic cheers.” [2]

A respected New York paper referred to the President as a “joke incarnated, his election a very sorry joke, and the idea that such a man as he should be the President of such a country as this, a very ridiculous joke.” [3]

A widely read magazine spoke of him deserving nothing but “hatred and scorn” for leading the nation into war. It wrote, “There are 500,000 new made graves, there are 500,000 orphans; there are 200,000 widows; there is a bottomless sea of blood.” [4]

And one imminent humanitarian described of him, “Not a spark of genius has he; not an element of leadership....” [5]

Of course, a knotty band of defenders, in large part deeply religious people [6], remained stubbornly loyal. They admitted mistakes had been made in the execution of the war and in other areas, too. But they argued that mistakes would be unavoidable in any great undertaking. These loyalists claimed that history would stand as the ultimate judge, not the winds of public opinion or the criticism of political enemies.

But that could not lift the cloud from over the Oval Office.

Poor President Lincoln, apparently one of the worst Presidents we would ever have:

1. [Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln, p. 13]

2. [Stephenson, Lincoln, p. 199]

3. [Trueblood, p. 167]

4. [Trueblood, p. 167]

5. [Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, The War Years, I, p. 555]

6. [Trueblood, p. 169 To Lincoln’s amazement he found that the Church “had become his strongest organized support.”]

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